Popularity of computing devices is growing day by day. Whether it is a computer desktop, a laptop, a tablet PC, a mobile phone or a personal digital assistant, using a computing device to accomplish a variety of personal and professional tasks has become a routine for most people in the present day world.
Many computing devices these days provide a touch screen or touch pad based user interface wherein a user input is obtained either through the user's finger or a stylus. The user can simply write in his or her natural handwriting on the touch pad and the computing device accepts the handwriting as the input. The existing handwriting recognition based interfaces require input in the standard writing order for the script (for example, left to right in case of English), so that the spatial positioning of the characters and words that make up the input are maintained. For example, the characters and words need to be approximately the same size, written next to one another, aligned with a (imaginary or displayed) baseline. Such input methods require user attention to writing, i.e. the user has to look at the writing surface (say, an external tablet) to make sure that the input is spatially correct and the position of each unit of writing, with respect to the other is maintained. In cases where the writing surface is different from the application display surface, the user has to look at writing surface while writing, and then at the display to see the results of recognition. This constant switching between the display device and writing surface after each writing unit results in significant cognitive load on the user, and greatly reduces the speed of entry. The present invention provides an attention-free user input mechanism for computing devices.